Unworthy Friend’, which we took with us to translate in the United States while Borges was lecturing at Oklahoma and where we gave readings and talks at a number of other universities. ‘Juan Muraña’, the story he had told me about the year before on the very spot where it was set, was finished in mid-January 1970. There was no stopping him now. ‘The Duel’ came next, but before he put the finishing touches to it he began dictating ‘The End of the Duel’. He had long since known he was doing the impossible – writing a new book of stories. On 3 March he finished ‘Guayaquil’ and on the fifth began ‘Doctor Brodie’s Report’. The day he finished ‘Brodie’ he began ‘The Gospel According to Mark’, completing the first draft of it in under a week. The only hiccup came when he had reached the eight mark. By then he was so anxious to see the collection in print that he ran out of patience. Not of stories, thank goodness, but of patience. He had another three in mind but he simply couldn’t wait. As the completed stories were very short, a book of them would have come to no more than seventy pages, and I considered that a mistake. He had been invoking Kipling and the Plain Tales from the Hills as a kind of model for his brevity; I pointed out, however, that Plain Tales ran to over three hundred pages and contained forty stories. It was no use; he was going to see Frías to tell him he wanted to publish a book of eight stories. And off he went.
I picked up the phone, got Frías, and explained the situation. ‘Say no to him,’ I told the publisher. ‘Tell him he’s got to write at least three more. They’re there in his head but he’s just being lazy.’
Frías saw that I was right. Borges came back and told me that Emecé wanted another three stories. To his credit, he didn’t sulk over the news for even a second. Sulking, like self-pity, was never one of Borges’s traits. Instead, he immediately set to work writing the three required stories, probably counting his blessings that he had three more stories to tell. I never told him about my intervention. We set about rereading and ordering the book-length typescript in mid-April, a week later he turned it in, and El informe de Brodie was published early in August. By any standard, it was a remarkable achievement; by his own, it was nothing short of a miracle. After nine years without writing a book, he had now, within twelve months, written two.
Like Turner, a painter he admired, Borges in his old age also set out to fashion something new, freer, more personal. In many ways he succeeded; undeniably, the prose of his late work is less cluttered and more responsible. He felt that at last he had found his voice. Six more volumes of poetry were to follow In Praise of Darkness; seventeen more short stories followed Doctor Brodie’s Report.
‘I no longer regard happiness as unattainable,’ he said bravely on reaching seventy-one.
That year, there were no celebrations when the book came out, and certainly there was no cake. Somewhat sadly, circumstances had changed.
There are among my papers two spiral-bound notebooks with ruled pages, workbooks I called them, in which I took down from his dictation on sixty-four recto leaves the story of Borges’s life. As far as I am aware, this autobiography is the single most extensive piece of writing Borges ever committed to paper. Like much else that we did, it too seems to have been born of a series of accidents or obstacles – unforeseen and unforeseeable events that somehow or other, uncannily, we kept turning to advantage.
With The Book of Imaginary Beings in print and a number of the recent stories and poems beginning to appear in American magazines, Borges and I itched for a chance to present in our own versions a selection of his older stories, the ones on which his fame rested. Of course, we would have preferred to translate the seventeen stories of his best book, El Aleph, written in the very rich period between 1945 and 1953, but a competing publisher, who claimed rights to about half these tales, prevented us from doing so. Our own publisher, however, the understanding and very accommodating Jack Macrae, was not averse to obliging us. So by begging, borrowing, and nearly stealing – that is, given the chance, we would have stolen – Borges and I were able to map out the volume that eventually appeared in the autumn of 1970 as The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969.
The exercise in autobiography had twofold roots. The first of them was in the vexing problem just described, when Borges was denied the right to determine the form and fate of his own work. As our compromise volume took shape, I grew ever more convinced that it needed something in addition to our spanking-new translations if we were to avoid hoodwinking the public with yet another anthology of Borges’s work.
The second part of these roots and of the story is a happier affair and even funny. At the University of Oklahoma, several months earlier, I had been able to prevail upon Borges – not without great difficulty – to conclude his set of six lectures on Argentine literature by talking about himself. But on the afternoon of that final lecture he was in a blue funk. He had never before spoken about his own work publicly – it would never have occurred to him to indulge in such a pointless, immodest activity – and it was late in the day, and why on earth, and he simply was not going to be able to go through with it, etc. I saw I had a full-scale panic on my hands. By some strange chemistry, however, his panics always managed to turn the blood in my veins to iced water. It was a partnership, after all, and one of us had to be steady at all times. After our customary afternoon naps – his sleepless and unrefreshing, he claimed – I could see how pent up he was, so I suggested a walk. Our hotel stood about three-quarters of a mile from the campus on what seemed to be the edge of Norman, Oklahoma, where it occupied the corner of a perfectly square block. Arm in arm, Borges and I slowly circumnavigated that block. Once.
‘Just remember your Dickens,’ I told him. Twice.
‘David Copperfield,’ I told him, ‘“I was born on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.”’ And three times.
‘Nothing fancy, now. You’re telling a story, that’s all there is to it.’
Every once in a while, Borges’s lips began to move. ‘I was born in Buenos Aires, in 1899,’ he mumbled.
‘That’s the hang of it,’ I said.
He was unconvinced. I couldn’t tell him, but so was I.
Of course, he did marvellously, his audience loved it, and our Oklahoma sponsors, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, were duly pleased. Three months later in Buenos Aires, recalling the little triumph, I had a brainstorm and asked them at Norman to provide us with a transcript of the talk. I wrote to Macrae to tell him that we’d hit on an idea to beef up the book: we would add to it Borges’s story of his own life, written directly in English. The lecture, I knew, would come to around twenty pages; I figured that with a few days’ work we’d be able to flesh it out to thirty. So carried away was I that somewhere along the line I promised Jack we’d provide the book with a kind of appendix as well, also to be written in English, in the form of commentaries on each of the book’s twenty stories. I knew that readers were having difficulty with Borges; worse, I knew that the universities kept him swathed in unnecessary mystery. At the same time, since his stories were really all about himself, his various guises, and dimensions of his thought, what better setting for them by way of introduction than the story of his life?
The pages from Oklahoma reached us sometime in April 1970. By then, we had most of the stories translated and seemed to be on target. But reading the transcript of the lecture, my heart dropped down into my shoes. The talk started out like David Copperfield, all right, but it soon went jumping all over the place without order or logic. Sick with worry, I explained the predicament to Borges, for some reason or other fearing a negative response on his part. Instead, undaunted, and paraphrasing one of his favourite authors – English and nineteenth century, of course – he said, ‘Fling it aside and be free! We’ll start again from scratch.’
We did. On 21 April, the day after the typescript of El informe de Brodie went off to Emecé, we pitched in. That first day I took down five pages. I was prepared this time. I made us outline the material beforehand, breaking his life down into manageable chunks, chapters, of which we ended up with five. I made him stick to that outline. ‘No, no, don’t jump ahead to your mother; let’s get it all down about your father and his family first and then we’ll tackle her.’ It went like that. The next day, I took down five more pages; the day after that, six. At this rate, it was going to come